September 27, 2011

• Feeling good. Seeking pleasurable emotions and sensations, from the hedonistic model of happiness put forth by Epicurus, which focused on reaching happiness by maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.

• Engaging fully. Pursuing activities that engage you fully, from the influential research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. For decades, Csikszentmihalyi explored people's satisfaction in their everyday activities, finding people report the greatest satisfaction when they are totally immersed in and concentrating on what they are doing — he dubbed this state of absorption “flow.”

I'm with Scott (except on the red sports car. It's a Harley for me). I'm not doing any of those things. But since I've been unhappy for nearly 40 years now, it's become my default position. Too late to change now.

Aristotle was not Epicurus. "Eudaemonia" is not merely....utilitarian pleasure but duty, virtue, moral obligations--and the Good (and real harmony) depends on fulfilling those obligations. Like an obligation to expose frauds and cheats--whether New Yawk bankers, or mormon swine.

Aristotle did not say that you ought to find out about your "true self." If anything, his definition of eudaimonia was more like Csikszentmihalyi than what they give him here -- or rather his view would perhaps be the fusion of these two sound bites, deepened and improved, a thousand times over.

Safe people are the real secret to contentment, and the Ten transcribed by Moses just so happen to lead to a society full of safe people.

Job begs to disagree.

I don't think contentment is happiness.

But happiness is the answer to the wrong question.

Living a meaningful life is more important than trying to find happiness. Character is more important than fulfillment. I know people desperately in search of self-actualization who leave nothing but wreckage in their wake.

Thanks, Ann. I just realized what has been going wrong inside my head as I've started homeschooling. No "Flow." I read that book several years ago, and it resonated, but I put it on a bookshelf and forgot about it.

It is hard to have flow with a seven-year-old switching subjects all the time. This is good food for thought.

I like traditional guy's wise comment that safe people are the secret to happiness. The persons with whom you are intimate and the society of which you are a part have veto power on your happiness. The sore paradox is that unhappy people are most likely to chose folie a deux partners and join movements that accentuate their misery. The great loves of both Hitler and Stalin committed suicide. Both men went on to alleviate their grief by immersing themselves in politics. There were no paths to happiness in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia.

I'm happy to say that I have lived long enough to regret the false paths I have followed in pursuit of happiness. It seems to me that there have been enormous numbers of people who were not able to choose wrongly, not even once.

I'm way too busy to pursue much pleasure. And I have my kids at home to teach, as well as two other groups of kids (one poor and needy, one for education), which is indeed a joy, but definitely not an epicurean pleasure.

"Lord, I keep so busy, workin' for the kingdom, ain't got time to die."

The secret to happiness just went from Ten Commandments to three suggestions.Safe people are the real secret to contentment, and the Ten transcribed by Moses just so happen to lead to a society full of safe people.

The secret to happiness is building your life on rock, not on sand. A great deal of unhappiness is caused by the loss of things (money, looks, etc.) or by the fear of losing them, while happiness is being secure in knowing that the important things are safe and cannot be lost.

So, as Augustine says, consistent with building on rock, the secret to happiness is putting your faith and trust in things eternal (truth, love, and dare I say it, God), which can never be taken away from you, rather than in things ephemeral, those worldly things (like money, possessions, looks, etc.) which can be easily lost and will, in any event, one day turn to dust.

Bobby McGee understood too -- "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

Well, I'm having a "spa week" this week - doing an iconography workshop. We gather for Mass every morning, have a chat about what insights or thoughts we had the day before or overnight concerning our icons, then paint, in silence and prayer, for hours. There's noonday prayer before lunch, which our lovely rector is making for us every day. At the end of the week, we will each have written an icon - I'm writing the Sinai Christ Pantocrator - which we will bless at the altar at our closing Mass on Friday.